![]() ![]() I spoke with Tamaki at this month’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival, where she was not only a featured guest but the official poster’s illustrator. Tamaki’s swirling, expressionistic brushwork foregrounded the ritualism and mystery surrounding its title character, a teenage Wiccan outcast who begins an affair with her bohemian English teacher. ![]() But the artist really hit her stride with Skim, a graphic novel scripted by her cousin Mariko. There was nothing dilettantish about her 2006 debut, Gilded Lilies, which collected various drawings, paintings and early comics experiments, including “The Tapemines,” 80 wordless pages of strange transformations and distorted forms. Tamaki’s career can be seen as an inversion of the typical cartoonist’s, taking on freelance jobs to eat in between their comics she’s been a full-time illustrator since graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in her Calgary hometown, making periodic forays into cartooning. She’s still drawing evocative, stylized illustrations for the likes of Esquire, The Guardian, Penguin Books and just about every venerable publication with “New York” in its title. ![]() In “Bad Mood,” a sketchbook strip from her last collection Indoor Voice, Jillian Tamaki contemplates a piece-in-progress: “You are completely without talent and this will finally expose you as the fraud you are.” It hasn’t happened yet. ![]()
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